White in the Moon

About the Book

This is a novel like no other. Although it has plot, characters, character-development, denoument, and narrative, it does not seek to entertain in the usual sense. Rather, it attempts to engage its readers intellectually--encouraging them to seek and find their own underlying unity. The novel is told from the perspective of five major characters--with a few interruptions by an omniscient speaker--and is a multi-genre attempt to explore the philosophical ontology underlying that uniquely human activity, the creation of art. White in the Moon is a study of metaphor--ultimately the origin of everything. It is not a book for the lazy reader.

About the Author

Eston E. Roberts was born on the twelfth of April, nineteen hundred and thirty-two, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the fi rst born child of Arthurlene Sutton Roberts and Carl Daniel Roberts. At the age of four, he and his two-year-old sister moved with their mother to reside with a great uncle in Damascus, Georgia. Carl Daniel Roberts was supposed to follow, but he never did. His parents divorced and his mother re-married—to James Charlie West ( J.C), a farmer and master of all trades. Eston (called Bobby, in honor of his father) was expected by his ninth year to drive a mule, to break new ground, to lay out and plant rows of peanuts, corn, and cotton— tasks that to the great disapproval of his step-father he was unable to perform adequately. One of his earliest memories is of the day he was taken to the fi elds to plow his fi rst row. His step-father, who had dropped out in elementary school to help his father on the farm and had long since forgotten his own learning curve in the fi eld of agriculture, pointed to a tree down at the end of the fi eld and said, “aim the mule toward that tree, and when you get to the end of the row it will be as straight as an arrow.” Knowing that this assignment was a test of his coming of age, Eston concentrated on that tree with all the intensity he could summon. When they reached the end of the row, both of them looked back down the row to see it wavering and wandering like the track of a snake. “Go on back to the house,” his step-father said, “I’d rather do it myself !” That lonely trek back to the house was the longest of his life. From that time on, when he was unable to live up to the stern standards set by his step-father, his mantra had become, “I don’t care; I’m not going to be a farmer anyway!” Small wonder he ended up as a teacher of English, a novelist, and a writer of poetry–a maker and interpreter of metaphor!